EDITORIAL

The trail of blood

Chandrika Kumaratunga knows the meaning of sorrow. Not only her father, but also her husband, was murdered. She herself spent many years in exile, as a near-penniless refugee in the West. Having been born to a noted fiefdom and grown up in the splendour of country house set amidst an estate of thousands of acres, she has come close to losing all. For much of her adult life she, like her siblings Anura and Sunethra, has been unemployed, living on patronage and the goodwill of friends. But for the eight years of her presidency, life has offered Kumaratunga little to smile about. One would have thought, then, that deprivation and persistent grief would have combined to build a finer, stronger woman alive to the suffering of others, anxious to strew sweetness and light as she went about her business. If so, one would have thought wrong.

In the run up to the elections of 1994, Kumaratunga set herself up as a model citizen: Mother Theresa could have taken her correspondence course with profit. No one stood taller for the cause of human rights; no one articulated more fluently the plight of the widow and the orphan. No one could have uttered the hated words dushanaya and bheeshanaya as evocatively as she did, rolling them off her tongue with sincerity that no doubt brought lumps to the throats of hardened criminals. The Sainted Chandrika shed tears for the oppressed, consoled the bereaved and comforted the downtrodden. Hers was a heart of gold.

Now, eight years later, revelations are coming thick and fast that her charade of righteousness was but skin deep. Behind those puckered lips and between those bejewelled ears labours a brain Lucrezia Borgia might have envied with justice. The wave of freedom and irreverence for presidential authority that has swept Sri Lanka since December 5 have led to a multitude of revelations that call the presidency gravely into question. Our very own Mother Theresa, it would seem, has blotched her habit.

On the road to Temple Trees and President's House lie puddles of blood, around each of which are footprints of the president's closest friends and associates. When the Canton Restaurant owned by (then) opposition MP Sarath Kongahage, at the time a strident critic of the president, was attacked in February 1997, the Presidential Security Division was clearly implicated. More than 20 military-type men carrying automatic weapons and riding in unmarked Pajeros stormed the restaurant and shot willy-nilly into the crowd. "There is only one group of men capable of carrying out an operation of this nature," we commented afterwards, "But none dare speak their name, or for that matter their three-letter acronym, which gives away the identity of their patron."

Despite it being well known that Baddegana Sanjeeva, a notorious criminal, was serving in the PSD as a close escort bodyguard of the president herself, Kumaratunga took no action to distance him from herself. The public slaying of the New Guinean rugby player Joel Perra before more than a dozen witnesses, and the inability of the police to secure a conviction, ensured that the message that Kumaratunga's PA was above the law was indelibly carved into the public psyche.

Worst of all, Kumaratunga, who came into office as the darling of the media, found it impossible to brook the inevitable criticism of her regime that followed.  Satana Editor Rohana Kumara and the dissident Tamil journalist Mariyadasan Nimalaranjan were shot dead (both were strident critics of Kumaratunga); and the editor of this newspaper and his wife were brutally assaulted in 1995. On a later occasion in 1998, they narrowly escaped death when machine gun fire was directed into their house, causing serious damage. Ominously, just days before the attack, the President publicly referred to The Sunday Leader as a 'garbage-can newspaper'. When violence against the media was raised at a subsequent press conference, Kumaratunga's uncle, Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte, stunned the press corps by propounding that violence is an "occupational hazard" journalists must learn to face. Media Minister Mangala Samaraweera went further: commenting on the killing of Rohana Kumara, he cynically claimed the journalist was a "disposable sacrifice".

The crowning glory of Kumaratunga's human-rights record came with the murder, premeditated and planned for weeks ahead, of the outspoken President of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress, Kumar Ponnambalam. A well-known nonconformist, Ponnambalam was an eccentric who kept pointing to Kumaratunga's hypocrisy on the Tamil cause. In the aftermath of the murder, Kumaratunga cynically wrote to his widow to condole with her, ominously predating her letter by a whole year. She also promised a full investigation. Taking this pledge at face value, the police soon discovered that Ponnambalam had been murdered at the behest of the president's nephew, Anuruddha Ratwatte's son Mahen. Ratwatte Junior commissioned two underworld thugs, Sudath Ranasinghe and Moratuwa Saman, to murder the dissident Tamil politician; a third assassin, one Sujeewa, also joined in the killing. Following the murder, Ratwatte  harboured Ranasinghe until he surrendered in connection with another offence. When questioned by the police, he had the audacity to tell the Director of the Crime Detection Bureau, 'Why are you worried? All the top people know about the assassination.'

It seems that to many in her administration, her Tissamaharama Doctrine, 'murder those who you think are murderers', is but a corollary of the core philosophy of violence that drives the presidency. This suspicion became all the more credible when Kumaratunga unguardedly disclosed that the murder of dissident journalists had repeatedly been discussed between herself and her cabinet ministers.

Baddegana Sanjeeva's links with the underworld were well known and widely exposed in the media: yet, Kumaratunga shielded him and kept him on as her bodyguard. By end last year however, it became clear that although the president continued to retain Sanjeeva, he had become a grave embarrassment to her. In November 2001, in the run up to the general election, Sanjeeva himself was mysteriously murdered. Many secrets were buried with him.

Last week, the police arrested members of the PSD who independently confessed to the assault on Lasantha Wickrematunga, editor of this newspaper. They related in detail how the attack was carried out, down to the details of who wore what. Sanjeeva himself led the attack, his face covered by a mask. Afterwards, they all trooped into Temple Trees, evidently to report that the job had been carried out to their patron's satisfaction.

Until now, there has been no hard evidence that Kumaratunga was directly responsible for the violence visited on journalists and dissidents in the course of her eight years of unfettered power. No smoking gun has been found in her closet. Yet, the trail of blood leads clearly into the precincts of Temple Trees and President's House: there is no arguing with that. Unlike at Watergate, there are no tapes to prove the president's complicity in the wave of crime unleashed in her name. But justice must be done, and she must atone. There is nothing sacred about Kumaratunga: she is yet another citizen of this country, and bound by the same laws as we all are, walawwa or no walawwa.